I love a good failure. I laugh when people walk into windows, I chortle when I see people fall on ice and I guffaw when I think about Rick Perry. But my favorite type of failure is when a large group of people get together to start a massive projec, and the end result is a publicized, abject catastrophe. What started that love, was Dashcon.
The Tumblr-centered convention made website headlines with its implosion back in 2014, and while that is the distant past in Internet time, I remember it as vividly as I do fondly. We were only given the surface information during the event, which was that the convention administrators gathered the 1000 attendees into one room and straight-up asked for $17,000 to keep the event going due to the hotel supposedly “demanding the money before the end of the day,” on top of the $65 entry fee. On its face, this seemed like extortion, but when I delved more into this case myself, I slowly began to learn that these people might not know how to spell the word “extortion,” let alone intentionally pull it off.
Now, this apparent travesty at this point, had enough information about it to make even Søren Kierkegaard laugh his existential ass off, but it was days after the event when I ended up delving a bit deeper and experienced the true joy that still makes me giddy to this day. You see, this event from its very conception was doomed with mismanagement, egos, unforeseeable--and by that I mean completely foreseeable--events and good old meat and potatoes stupid.
Dashcon--which was at first named Tumbl-Con USA, but had to be changed due to Tumblr not wanting to be associated with this pile of snail turds--had incredible ambition, the same type of ambition that Jim Gilmore’s 2016 presidential campaign rode on. The convention founds, Megan Eli and Roxanne Schwieterman, quite eloquently asked for help by typing in some blog “WHO WANTS TO FORM A COMMITTEE TO HELP US RAISE FUNDS?” This call to action brought together a good number of willing participants. A problem with this, however, was that the average age of these people was about 17. And we’re talking people on Tumblr. Tumblr! I’d put my trust of running a successful project into Siamese crawfish over Tumblr users. At least those creatures are cray-cray in a good way. Throw in an obviously fake television deal, expectations of impossible-to-attain guests, gross mistreatment of the guests the convention managed to get, extraordinary lies of who was actually responsible for the failure, the goddamn ball pit and a lot of other factors I wish I had the space to go into, and viola, the disaster of the summer was created.
Since this event, I have spent many a day for complete and utter disasters, none of them quite equating to my particular love of Dashcon. So I implore you, Internet: please fail for me. Fail on this level, specifically. I’ve waited too long for this type of failure to repeat itself. I need you to do this, if not for me, then for everyone like me, who are also looking forward to a convention to crash and burn. Thank you in advance. Hahaha! Sorry, I thought of Rick Perry again.
